Couple loses land to squatter's rights law

If you own a piece of property, it's a good idea to know what is going on there.

If you don't, you could end up losing it.

A Valley woman can attest.

The woman and her husband purchased a large parcel of land a few miles away from their home as an investment, and sort of forgot about it.

Meanwhile, a neighbor to the land used it for 21 years and then claimed ownership, using the old "squatter's rights" law in Pennsylvania.

"We purchased it in the 1970s, as an investment," the woman said. "We paid the taxes on it every year, but never looked at it. We thought, who is going to steal it? It's land. You can't put it on a flatbed and haul it away."

Also, the neighbors of the land were friends of the couple.

"These were people we knew all of our lives," she said. "We were not aware what was going on with the land."

When the couple decided to sell the parcel to raise money for their four children, they discovered the plight of the land.

"We had a buyer, so we hired a surveyor," she said. "That's how we found out about it. When we hired the surveyor, we got served with papers that (the neighbors) had put in a claim."

Then, lawyers for both sides began to negotiate and the result was that the neighbors ended up with 55 percent, the lawyer for the couple 25 percent and 20 percent for the couple.

"Hopefully, we can still sell it," she said. "One of the reasons we didn't keep up with what was going on there was that the land was off then beaten path. The land was a few miles away from our house. And the land was landlocked. We went out to see it, and it was a very bumpy ride "

The woman said she and her husband could have opted for a jury trial to get the land back, but then they took the risk of losing all of it.

"We didn't want to go to trial," she said. "This could have dragged out for years. We didn't want to do that."

So they took the deal.

But the woman wanted to use her unpleasant experience to educate others.

"It's just not ethical," she said. "I wouldn't do that to somebody. It's so much like stealing. (The neighbors) didn't pay the taxes on it, nor did they have the deed. We paid the taxes on it, all those years.

"I think people should be made aware that this law exists," she continued. "I don't want to see this happen to someone else. We should teach children in school skills they will need to live, like how to balance a checkbook and how the stock market works. We should also teach them about the law."

The law is called adverse possession, and what happened to the woman is relatively common across the United States, according to attorney William Hoffmeyer, of the Hoffmeyer & Semmelman law firm of York, experts in land law.

Hoffmeyer said any neighbor who permits use of their land for 21 years can lose the land to the person using it.

Hoffmeyer said the law arose when Pennsylvania was being settled by William Penn.

"It started when land was going to waste," Hoffmeyer said. "The law was created so that if someone else could use the land, they got it."

Hoffmeyer said there are four key concepts for someone to claim, or lose, adverse possession.

"Those words are open, notorious, hostile and visible," he said. "Open means if someone is doing something with the land right out in the open and not hiding it," Hoffmeyer said.

"Notorious is if anybody knows what is happening on the land. Visible means one can see what is being done with the land, and hostile means what is being done with the land is against the rights of the true owner."

There are some ways to fight the law. Hoffmeyer said.

"If the landowner could take action to eliminate any of those words," he said. "For instance, to eliminate hostile, the landowner can take specific legal action against the user. They can tell them they are no longer permitted to use the land, and if they continue to do so, a trespass action will be filed against them. Or a court injunction could be filed, that forbids the people on the land."

Hoffmeyer said he encounters many cases of adverse possession in his daily practice.

"We see it quite a bit," he said. "It happens many times with people who inherit land from their parents. They don't live anywhere close to the property, so have no idea what is going on there. Out of loyalty to their parents, they pay the taxes on it every year, but never look at the property until they discover a neighbor is trying to take it from them.

"It also happens when neighbors around a property inch over a boundary line," Hoffmeyer continued. "A less-than-desirable neighbor may mow the lawn over the line; or plant trees, flowers or shrubbery over the line, or install a fence over the line."

It is up to the property owner to monitor such activity, and stop it as soon as he or she learns it is happening, Hoffmeyer said.

"You can write a letter to the neighbors, telling them they are trespassing," he said. "In the letter, you tell them if they don't cease and desist, you will initiate a trespassing action against them."

Hoffmeyer said in one case, a landowner who had sold land around him noticed his new neighbors were moving in - literally - toward him.

"The landowner sent the neighbors a letter which stated they all acknowledged and understood they were not acquiring ownership of the land, but were being permitted to use it," Hoffmeyer said. "They were also told they had to assume the liability for the property they are using."

jdino@standardspeaker.com

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67 posted comments

i am a surveyor,and this law existed a long time before the state of PA. existed,it was the only way to acquire title,back in the day,you just conquered the other guys stuff,it came to america from the U.K.

To all of you who believe that the squaters should pay 55% of the taxes, I guess that means that the "land owner" whos property I have been maintaining for the last 7 years owes me alot of money for for all the work I have done.

There is a small chunck of property (about 2 acres) beside my house. When we moved here 7 years ago we wanted to buy the property but the owner wanted an outrageous price. Ever since then we have been using the land. We cleaned it up. It was full of garbage, rubble, debris and junk from someone remodeling our home before we moved in. There were huge mosquito nests and bee hives, we couldn't even stand to be in our own back yard. We've had trees fall on our property and we clean it up. We mow it all season and our kids and dogs play on it. Most people we know think we own it. The owner never comes around, but he lives a few miles down the road so we know he has drove by and seen what we have done with it and he says nothing. We plan to claim it as ours some day and we dont believe it is dishonest because it was an eye sore and someone needed to do something about it, we did. He don't deserve it!

My neighbors are trying to take land from an elderly lady on the other side of them. They have straight out told me what they plan to do. I'm making sure that the elderly lady and her grown sons know what these dishonest people are doing. So glad I found your article because I wasn't sure that this law even still existed. Very sad that something like this is still permitted to happen.

Since the neighbors ended up with 55% it only seems fair that they should pay the "true" owners of the land 55% of the taxes that they paid on the land for the last 21 yrs. After all, had the taxes not been paid on this parcel, the neighbors would have been evicted by a Sheriff's sale as soon as the taxes went unpaid....

I am going to live on the steps of the courthouse and then try to claim it for my own, then i am moving on to the white house. What a shame for those hardworking people!! I hope no one finds out the name of the land stealers and pays them a visit! You should be ashamed of yourself.

This works two ways. My quarter acre yard was fenced by the owner of the adjacent farm a hundred years ago. The fence has been rebuilt on the existing line by the adjacent farm owner at least five times, twice during the thirty years I have lived here. The son who just inherited the family farm has had his property surveyed and is claiming a section on my side of the fence that I have been maintaining for thirty years. I'm hoping that adverse possession will keep the kid from moving his pasture fence two feet onto what I have always assumed to be my property.

I don't know how you Yankees handle this. In the south, the resolution would more likely be somewhat more forceful, and very quiet unless the interloper resisted. It would at that point become very noisy, punctuated by repeated staccato bursts of loud sound. Take MY land at YOUR peril.

Adverse possession is only a fancy name for legalized land theft. I have a feeling those who posted in favor of the thief would feel very differently if the land to lose was their own.

Just because they own property doesn't mean they have money to burn. Just because they own property doesn't mean its out there for someone to steal. Maybe this law had its purpose in the days of William Penn, but today it only gives people a license to steal.

Open, notorious, hostile and visible....so as long as you openly do something wrong, in the end you get to take what you like!! I don't care if its your backyard, wooded lot, field or acreage miles away from you home, this is about as unethical as a person could be! Stealing is stealing...plain and simple.

Not addressing the issue of right or wrong, the idea of adverse possession is that the person who owns the land is not doing anything with it (not even inspecting it in over 20 years). The neighbor was actually doing something with the land (for over 20 years) and was rewarded for that usage. The message to landowners is simply that they should take a look at their property at least once in 20 years. And you don't need to run the people off with guns, just tell them to get lost and file an action for trespassing (if they come back, the clock resets and they have to possess it for 21 years again).

The easiest way to stop adverse possession is to have your lawyer write the tresspasser a letter. If you want to be nice, you can even rent the land to them for a dollar a year or allow them to locate the fence on your land in exchange for their service of mowing the grass on "their side."

Once it's no longer hostile, it's protected.

Or rent a Bobcat every year, and plow along your property line, thus maintaining your land.

If anyone out there thinks they own land, you better wake up, stop paying your taxes., see how quick it goes up for a sheriffs sale. Do you own your home? Stop paying taxes on it? It is your property right? And Sean "if that is your real name" greed is greed. Some people can never get enough money. If the tables were turned I am sure these people would do the same darn thing. Typical Yankees. No moral values, no social values,. One of my favorite stories ". A rich man owned 500 acres, it was HIS land, never wanted any TRESPASSERS on it. Would not even let a child pick blueberries, or an old woman look for her dying dog. Or a family that had nothing look for some mushrooms to eat. It was HIS land. He got it from his father, who gave it to him. His great great great grandfather claimed the land for free. That old man was my father, and I hated him with every fiber in my body, that was a very evil person, when he died he left me the land,. Enough said.

I'm a new home builder & Realtor, I knew of the law but didn't think people still stole land like this in modern times. This should be an eye opener for everybody who owns land. Most of the land that I buy & build on has had areas where neighboring people cleared to use & make their yards seem bigger. I hate when they do that, that means when I have to clear the land, we're left with no greenery buffer between houses.

It just ain't right...I at least hope the couple get back the taxes they paid on the land all these years. You would think the fact they paid the taxes every year would give them legal rights to the land. I wonder if their lawyer looked into that angle of the law.

Buying land or andy other investment and expecting not to have to guard it every day from theft is not an act of greed. The squatter's law is a law that allows people to push others around and steel from them. It is unethical and should be changed. Taking land by force is an act rooted in the principals of forceful occupation. If someone squat's on someone else's land or property, they should expect to be removed by the same use of force with which they took that land. Then, the whole thing degenerates.

The use of squatter's rights is just sneaky and deceitful. Someone goes to their puritan Pennsylvania Sunday morning services and then takes another 10 feet of their neighbor's land Sunday afternoon.

Its wrong! Its wrong! Its wrong! We know, just by looking at the story that the taking of another's property through physical occupation is a forceful act of theft. The fact that the law allows it does not make it ok. Laws have been deemed by the American public to be unethical in the past, there is no reason why a law in the present cannot be deemed unethical and changed.

There is a long history or legalized unethical economic behavior by Pennsylvanian's. Our laws reward unethical economic behavior, especially by large institutions and even more so by quasi state institutions. It is embedded in our history going back to even before we about ourselves as a member of the the U.S. and carried on through then.

Many people in our area are aware of the fact that an extension of the Erie Canal ran through PA and even Wilkes Barre. You may not be aware of the fact that graduate finance classes that teach the history of emerging markets and their debt histories teach of the fact that Pennsylvania never paid back the money it borrowed from Londoners and Europeans to build the Erie Canal. We did the same thing to the French when we convinced them to pay for our revolution. We also forced the Native Americans of Pennsylvania to accept our tricking them out of their land. Letting everyone believe we tricked them likely allowed everyone to save face. If they did not let us carve out the keystone in a race, we would just used muskets and taken it anyway.

The lesson to learn from this is that when someone begins to occupy your land, you need to take aggressive action against them just to keep what is already rightfully yours. This is nuts. The laws must be changed. The problem is our laws that legalize taking your neighbor's land. Its a better way than telling people to buy muskets to deal with the intruding neighbors.

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